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Comment by rdsubhas

3 hours ago

The DoD buys from suppliers, who buy from suppliers, and so on. Hence supply chain. Hence supply chain risk.

I don't think anyone doubts that subcontracts exist. They doubt that Anthropic's insistence that Claude isn't capable of being the operating system for an automated killbot and associated terms the DoD previously agreed to means that there's any danger to the US military from Lockheed Martin using Claude as a code assistant to build GUIs.

"Supply chain risk" specifically refers to risk of malicious attack or sabotage through the supply chain, not all risks associated with supply chains.

A vendor with particularly poor QA might be a risk in your supply chain but isn't a "supply chain risk" according to this designation and neither would Anthropic be.

You would think that's a surprisingly easy concept to grasp, but many are viewing this through the lens of desired outcome and not reality.

  • Supply chain risks are usually when someone does a attack over the supply chain. Like when the mossad planted literally explosives in radio devices for Hezbollah.

    Antrophic merely said they don't allow their tools to be used for autonomous killing.

    A very specific case.

    So where is the danger making it necessary preventing all suppliers from using Claude at all? That only concerns those who work directly on autonomous killing and only they will have to go to Altman or Musk.

    So none of that is any threat to the military - so it was just black mailing to make them do the governments will - which is something usually dictatorships do, not democratic systems.

    • supply chain risk has a standard definition that matches what you think, and a legal definition that lets the government do whatever it wants.